Public says no, County says yes, to haul road plan

Despite a nearly unanimous "no" from the public, the Mendocino County Coastal Zone Administrator said "yes" to State Parks' $750,000 plan to rip out the northern remnants of the old Haul Road along Ten Mile Beach. The Westport Municipal Advisory Council has appealed the approval to the Board of Supervisors.

Like a meeting last summer at the Fort Bragg Grange, park advocates, environmentalists and conservatives united to speak against the project. There were two people who simply asked questions, but did not oppose or support the project. State Parks did receive positive written comments among the 41 letters from agencies and individuals.

Last week's meeting was polite, unlike the meeting last summer when some dune area homeowners got upset with State Parks' dogged determination to spend the grant money it has gotten for the project.

Ren?e Pasquinelli, senior environmental scientist for California State Parks, told the audience last week the project was a "done deal" because nobody had filed a lawsuit to challenge State Parks' finding that its own project would not have any negative environmental impacts.

The project

The old Haul Road was built as a logging railroad a century ago, but soon became a road used by big trucks to deliver logs from Ten Mile River to the Union Lumber Mill. State Parks began buying land to add to MacKerricher in the 1970s and completed the process by the mid-1990s. Until the late 1980s, the road provided a hard surface for bicycles or walkers all the way from the western end of Ward Avenue to Ten Mile Bridge. The ocean ripped out most of the road north of Ward Avenue.

State Parks proposes to dig up and truck away 2.7 miles of the remnant road, totaling 25,000 cubic yards. That would total about 2,500 dump truck loads (or about 675 million pounds) being carried across the sensitive habitat, under the bridge and out on a road east of the highway.

Thousands of tons of sand will have to be removed from the existing road first, to allow access by heavy equipment. Where the roadway ends, a temporary ramp made of natural rock material would be trucked in to move tractors and dump trucks across wet sand on the beach below in order to reach stranded remnants of the old haul road at the southern end of the preserve.

The material will be disposed of on other state park sites or private property located about 5 miles from the project. The County attached a special condition that State Parks dispose of the materials as close as possible, keeping all that truck traffic off the roads.

Community response

"Why are we spending this money?" asked Tony Phillips, who looks out on the site from his home on Simpson Road. "When there are so many worthy things the government could be spending on and this project seems to achieve nothing. We are obviously destroying something that worked for many years. It appalls me, especially around Fort Bragg where we have many, many real needs for the money, there must be a use for this better than mucking about with the haul road."

Most of those who spoke, many who live among the moving dunes, said yanking the road out would injure species State Parks is trying to save.

Thad Van Bueren, chairman of the Westport Municipal Advisory Council, said the project will reduce habitat for endangered plants and could destroy 11 percent of the endangered Howell's spineflower population. He wrote that project-induced intrusion of salt water will reduce critical habitat for endangered plants and animals.

State Parks responded to each criticism previously received in writing, although they did not change their plans based on public opposition. The response to Van Bueren challenged his credential to ask the question.

"As your opening statements attest, you are a professional archeologist and historian. However, you do not provide reference of expertise in botany, dune ecology, or geomorphology. The environmental document for the MacKerricher Dune Rehabilitation Project was prepared by a team of professional coastal ecologists, and included State Archaeologists, Historians, Engineering Geologists, and Environmental Scientists. Rather than "destroy' populations of endangered species and their critical habitats, the project will greatly benefit these species by increasing critical natural habitat that will lead to the recovery of endangered populations," was the written reply, signed by Pasquinelli.

Van Bueren has appeared in State Parks' press releases as a volunteer docent. The Westport Municipal Advisory Council is an official County body appointed by the Board of Supervisors to represent the interests of unincorporated Westport.

Several locals asked State Parks to reestablish the rest of the old haul road, with Stan Anderson suggesting an old proposal of using floating boardwalks be revised. Pasquinelli said that had been studied at length a decade ago and found not to be possible.

"Been there done that. It is not happening," Pasquinelli said.

She admonished Anderson for knowing that any road would disrupt sensitive environmental and archeological sites but asking anyway.

State Parks' argument is that there is access by way of the beach. Bicycles can brave Highway 1. The County did require that State Parks seek to add a 15-foot right of way for bikes. However, this area is owned by Caltrans and other private property owners, not State Parks.

"I walk on the beach all the time; the beach is not access," said Betty Goldfarb.

"It's extremely difficult for anyone to walk on the soft sand, 4 miles or even a few miles, most people in this room could not do it. It's pretty much nonsense to call the beach a public access trail."

Goldfarb continued, "We own the state parks. Park employees work for us and they need to listen to what the people want. People want recreation. ... It's also very good for tourism."

Westport's appeal

The Westport appeal says the haul road has been the designated coastal trail through MacKerricher since it was certified as such by the California Coastal Commission in 1983.

"The beach route is not a viable alternative because it discriminates against many users who still enjoy the haul road and is dangerous in winter due to sleeper waves," the Westport appeal states.

Van Bueren pointed out that although State Parks now argues that it is not a trail because it is no longer continuous, when the road was acquired in the mid-1990s, State Parks itself called it an important trail, despite the fact several miles had already been washed out in the late 1980s.

"Loss of the haul road is a significant unmitigated loss of access," said Van Bueren.

Anderson said the remaining haul road keeps human users in one area. After it has been bulldozed away, people will be all over the place.

"If you provide people with a stable walking surface, they are going to stay on it," Anderson said.

Anderson has been chairman of the board of the Mendocino Area Parks Association and is involved in marine mammal rescue and state parks user groups. However, Anderson never mentioned those groups by name and made it clear he was speaking as an individual.

Anderson said the road also is needed for emergency access and because access is mandated under the plan state parks created and sold to the public when the northern portion was added in the mid-1990s.

He argued that access to the logging road be reestablished, not reduced.

However, as Pasquinelli said, replacing the road across the dunes would likely be impossible due to modern environmental laws. In some places, the ocean has realigned the entire coastline and it's hard to imagine there was ever a road there. A "replacement" road would have to be located in an entirely new area.

State Parks seems to give little consideration to the idea that the ocean might also remove the remaining road on its own, or to consider unintended impacts of removal of the beach grass.

"Until State Parks allowed sand to cover the logging road, the incidence of European Beach Grass on the [east] side was negligible," said Anderson.

Much of the northern portion of the road is covered in sand ranging from a few inches to more than 3 feet deep. David Paoli, who runs an engineering and surveying firm in Fort Bragg, claimed the sand began to move across the road only after State Parks removed the European Beach grass from the west side.

Paoli said removing the road would in effect be removing a dam that keeps back sensitive wetlands habitat. State Parks says sand has stacked higher and higher due mainly to the invasive European beach grass but also due to the haul road.

"The sand has stacked higher and higher and higher. Just inland from the haul road we have wetlands. What we have is a dam, which has collected a lot of the sand. That sand is ready, willing and able to move east through the wetlands," said Paoli.

"Their plan is to strip the asphalt, remove the ballast and go back to how it was before 100 years of the dam being there," said Paoli.

"About 700,000 cubic yards is available to move inland when the sand is removed. How fast, we don't know for sure," said Paoli, who used his surveying skills and equipment to study the area.

Environmental

concerns

Could the removal damage or drain the visible wetlands? The question has been asked repeatedly but does not seem answered in the final plans. Although discussed in question-and-answer format, that discussion did not seem to alter the plans.

"There is a lot of material. I commented on this, I presented a report to both county planning and parks. I never heard anything about it since and none of that material seems to have made its way into the staff report," said Paoli.

Eric Freeman pointed out that after the ocean tore out several miles of the logging road in the late 1980s, the positive benefits Parks hopes to gain now by ripping out more road did not happen. Areas north of Ward Avenue where the road was torn out have in fact become much, much steeper since the road was ripped out.

"I, like Dave Paoli, have received no response to my comments," said Freeman.

Freeman said there has been no study of possible contamination of old railroad ballast that was used to create the haul road as a railroad a century ago.

He said toxic materials were often used in railroad beds around California that could present a problem.

"There are better uses of state dollars than destruction of a road that has been used for years and years," said Ray Duff of Caspar. "Using machines and materials that will cause additional damage and pollution when they take all this material away isn't good."

Duff said the whole business of State Parks giving itself an exemption was "the fox minding the chicken house." State Parks had ruled in favor of itself with a negative declaration exempting it from an environmental review.

Teresa Sholars was designated by State Parks to respond to the public at the end of the public input section. She has local credibility as a College of the Redwoods professor and consultant on native plants to developers, loggers and environmental agencies.

"I'm not a fox in the henhouse. I'm an external consultant that has been hired, actually for a long time, 38 years, to look at the native plant situation in MacKerricher," she said, smiling.

She described how her husband drove logging trucks on the haul road when it was still in use by the mill. She owns 40 acres of redwoods herself.

"As a rare plant specialist. I want to assure people this project is going to enhance the diversity of native plants and especially rare species and most especially that one species that occurs only in MacKerricher [a spineflower]."

County's role

Andy Gustafson, acting as coastal permit administrator, explained that the County's role on behalf of the California Coastal Commission was to decide if the development satisfied requirements for environmental quality and public access.

For example, it was not up to the administrator to decide whether State Parks was upholding its promises under its own plan or wasting money that could be better spent on something else. He ruled that parks had presented evidence that the project would improve the environment and would not significantly impact public access.

State Parks responded to public criticism in its documents by telling critics they were simply wrong.

"Your [Van Bueren's] determination that long-term impacts not identified in the IS/MND would occur, including erosion, deflation, and inundation, is incorrect," said Pasquinelli, about State Parks' certainty that pulling up European Beach Grass is effective.

This conceals a debate in the scientific community as to whether well-established invasives can be eliminated in the long term or should be dealt with as part of a changed ecosystem.

State Parks abandoned spraying the grass after local protest and went to removing it by hand. Spraying remains a common technique for Parks, just not in MacKerricher, locals heard last summer.

Last week's decision can be appealed to the Coastal Commission if the Board of Supervisors upholds Gustafson, Van Bueren said.

"Our intention in bringing this appeal to the is not adversarial," Van Bueren said. We appreciate the good work State Parks staff does with constantly diminishing funding. ? The community is willing to help State Parks realize that goal and assist with maintenance. Having a trail of that kind will be a huge asset to the community, providing access in a responsible way that avoids the proliferation of social trails and protects the sensitive habitat and its endangered and threatened species."